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After an artillery duel of terrific magnitude, they drove the Bavarian army from the forests of Champenous and took Amance. The line of the Meurthe was then found untenable by the Germans, and on September 12, 1914, General de Castelnau reoccupied the town of Luneville, which had been in the hands of the Germans since August 22, 1914.
Well, it is a pity the gods did not order it so! "to be a tale for those that should come after." One more incident before we leave Lorraine! On our way up to the high village of Amance, we had passed some three or four hundred French soldiers at work. They looked with wide eyes of astonishment at the two ladies in the military car.
After Velaine fell next day, and the defile between the two mountain-hills of Amance swarmed with yelling Uhlans, the French still held. They did not hope, but they fought. How they fought! And at the breaking point, as if by miracle, appeared the reinforcing tirailleurs.
Geneviève was badly smashed by shell. So was the church in the village on the Plateau d'Amance, as are most churches in this district of Lorraine. Framed through a great gap in the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of debris at its feet.
Forests blazed, and a rain of bombs poured over the country from clouds of flame and smoke. Amance was lost, and with it hope also; for beyond, the road lay open for a rush on Nancy, seemingly past the power of man to defend. Still, man did defend! If the French could hold out against ten times their number for a few hours, there was one chance in a thousand that reinforcements might arrive.
His pluviometrical measurements, continued for three years, 1866-1868, show that during that period the annual mean of rain-fall in the centre of the wooded district of Cinq-Tranchees, at Belle Fontaine on the borders of the forest, and at Amance, in an open cultivated territory in the same vicinity, was respectively as the numbers 1,000, 957, and 853.
Now, as we all chatted together, officer-and-man distinction disappeared. We were in a family party. It was all very simple to mes poilus, that first fight. They had been told to hold. If Ste. Geneviève were lost, the Amance plateau was in danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy. Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too much.
How much there would be still to say about the charm and the kindness of Lorraine, if only this letter were not already too long! But after the tragedy of Gerbéviller I must at any rate find room for the victory of Amance.
Alas! the morning was dull and misty when we left Nancy for Amance and the Grand Couronné; so that when we stood at last on the famous ridge immediately north of the town which saw, on September 8th, 1914, the wrecking of the final German attempt on Nancy, there was not much visible except the dim lines of forest and river in the plain below.
Our view ought to have ranged as far, almost, as Metz to the north and the Vosges to the south. But at any rate there, at our feet, lay the Forest of Champenoux, which was the scene of the three frantic attempts of the Germans debouching from it on September 8th to capture the hill of Amance, and the plateau on which we stood.
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